The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Amy Glynn are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
In 2012, I wasn’t “processing” much but trauma (unless you count copious amounts of coffee). I was very preoccupied with loss and death—largely my own, but also the deaths of friends, family members, jobs, lovers, marriage, phases of life. I had recently published my first book. I had some ideas swirling for a second one but it felt monumentally out of reach. Shortly before I left for a fellowship at the James Merrill House, I had a vivid dream. In it, Merrill (looking as he had in the early 90s, the first and only time I ever met him) stood before a wall of books in a sun-drenched room. He was speaking intently to me, but soundlessly. He kept gesturing at the bookshelves; there was (clearly) something there that he wanted me to see. For days afterward the image replayed like the cyclical crackles of a record player stylus at the end of a groove. Looking back, I’d probably seen photos of the apartment when I’d applied for the fellowship, but when I arrived, I was stunned to find I’d accurately dreamed Merrill’s upstairs solarium.
Merrill was (and is) one of my most powerful influences, a writer whose formal acrobatics and massive, symphonic vocabulary took my breath away. A month in the mise en scene for The Changing Light at Sandover was a serious pilgrimage for me.
But I was really blocked. I’d even resorted to the derpy but inevitable: soliciting Merrill’s legendary Ouija board for advice. It was… uncooperative, which hardly seemed fair. Yeats and Auden had been having such a laid-back afterlife they had time for years of cosmos-splaining colloquy with Jimmy. After all the years I’d spent with his poems, why was Merrill pulling a “new phone who dis?” cold-shoulder worthy of my worst ex?
I have “formalist” leanings, though I dislike the term. I have a theory that formalists are people with extremely chaotic minds who turn to formal containers in a bid to impose some kind of order on the inner wilderness. My poetry collections never come together meaningfully without an organizing principle, “high concept” or other framing device. I’ve given up fighting it. I had the book’s title, several of the poems and a sense of its key themes—loss and disintegration, Romanticism and “authority,” permanence and impermanence, structure itself and its inevitable collapse—but I was foundering.
2012 was an epic leaf year in Connecticut. As a Bay Area native there are few things I find more exotically dazzling than a New England broadleaf forest in October. I walked to the Stonington cemetery every day. On this one I was sitting among the grave markers, feeling very alone and more than a little hung over thanks to a post-reading dinner party where I’d had too much champagne, when the wind kicked up and it started raining bronze and scarlet and yellow and purple leaves—and I left my body.
There’s a phenomenon called the Casimir effect, where if you place two mirrors opposite one another and stand between them, you can see the reflection of your reflection and the reflection of your reflection’s reflection in a receding cascade of identical images. Suddenly I saw the entire universe like that… it was as if the past and the future had become interchangeable; everything became part of a vast cosmic mandala, images repeating, elaborating, telescoping. This went on for over an hour, during which, if you happened to be walking past the cemetery, you would have seen a crazy or very high-seeming person leaping off headstones, singing at the top of her lungs, and twirling like a child in a party dress trying to catch leaves. It would take me six more years to actually complete the book, but everything I needed came through in that hour. The Ouija board might’ve been mum…. But the trees and headstones were giving up the goods bigtime.
A favorite fragment of Sandover has Merrill moaning about his Ouija-mediated assignment to write “poems of science,” despite being a science-nebbish who couldn’t be expected to work with words like “mitochondria.” Then…
Whereas through Wave, Ring, Bond, through Spectral Lines
And Resonances, blows a breath of life….
The quote itself had featured prominently in a craft lecture I’d delivered on a sanity-thrashing trip to Rome the previous summer. I considered the word-play value of those words, as I had in that lecture: Ring, as in bell, as in wedding, as in telephone, as in benzene; Bond, as in familial, chemical, financial, adhesive, legal; as in shackles, paper, brick patterning. It was all there. In Sandover, Merrill drew on Yeats’s A Vision, finally leaning into an influence he’d tried to obscure in earlier work. I’d been trying to de-Merrillize my poems since I was sixteen—now, though, I took those “monosyllabic bezoars already found in the gullet of a three-year-old” for section titles: Wave, Ring, Bond, Spectral lines, Resonances, Breath of Life, Eclogue. Tiles of the mosaic began to fall into place. I started with Rome itself. Hadrian’s Villa:
Even
the dust is dazzling: glinting grit,
biotite
mica’s black fire in the dirt,
glass
pulverized underfoot. The grandiose
wreckage
goes on forever. Everything
recrystallizes
over time; chert turns
to
flint, shale turns to slate, acanthus leaves
blanch, petrify;
, the Pantheon:
The
info enters the eyeball in reverse,
and
the mind upends it. Radial symmetry
has
always ruled the mandala: let there be
the
visible image of the universe,
imposed
on the sky like a film on a cinema screen.
Adult
themes: tensile strength and the sublime
eloquence
of omission.
The pigeons in the Campo dei’ Fiori:
We survive
by
cobbling things together; we’re about
acceptance.
Which is not the same as peace.
It’s
letting things be piecemeal, rather; thriving
on
it, omnivorous, adaptive to the nth.
It’s
taking what the world gives with reflexive
good
grace, humbly reflective on its each
small
simple gratification: the left over,
cast
off, accretive tesserae, the cracks
between
the stones where anything can lodge.
We
dodge contempt. We are the square’s familiars.
We
sample what’s on offer, and we never
complain
it’s not enough.
…the Villa Borghese, the Janiculum, Baroque churches, public fountains. Some of the poems overtly play with poems of Merrill’s, especially utilizing his go-to, Casimir-effect ABBA stanzas:
Mandala
Your point's made, I'm an infidel.
But who needs friends
To remind him that nothing either lasts
or ends?
Garrulous as you, dear, Time will tell.
–James
Merrill, “Mandala”
Infidel. That’s a funny word for it.
Perhaps instead
call this saccade, the eye getting ahead
of a distance shift or a change in light. We ought
to say enlightened or lucid or something
better than lit
on just-OK
bourbon.
Why infidel?
Others “converse” with poems by Mary Jo Salter (my college mentor and definitely my other poetry-parent), Richard Kenney, Keith Waldrop, Homer, or Romantic masters like Coleridge and (especially) Keats, who graciously provided two riffs on his odes, including this one where I aped not only the structure of “To Autumn” but (because I am that kind of geek) its exact rhyme phonemes:
Cue
up the twist: things yellow and senesce
And
curl in on themselves and come undone.
Botrytis-botched,
yeast-bloomed, decadent mess
Of
must and pomace, arrows of geese nocked one
After
another and loosed southward. Freeze,
Bud:
keep those carpals in plain sight. No more:
Call
off the withdrawal of chloroplastic cells
That
spurs the stupid deciduous woodland’s war
Of
attrition. Detachment’s well and good but please,
Stop
the parade now and grant us all some peace
From
chatterbox blackbird flocks and dumb autumn smells.
What I struggled with longest was the “spectral lines” section, which I intended to be a series of poems but was reduced to one in the end: a sestina, that most miserable of formalist torture devices and the only one that even came close—though I doubt anything truly ever will come close—to commemorating that day in the Stonington Cemetery.
October 2012
Now every cell wall paints itself with flame:
Water Street’s ginkgos go to sulfur; shades
of burnt orange claim the beeches, the late light
acting as an accelerant. The Sound
is offering its ghost-notes up as well;
gongs, restive boats. Everything else is leaves.
Chlorophyll gets costly, so the leaves
discard it, baring arteries of flame
and bronze. I’d like to tell you all is well
here, that the bony twigs that tap those shades
message me all night long, meting out sound
like small-hours text pings, substantively light
though dazzlingly composed. But you are light
years from me now, a ghost who rustles leaves
and rattles glassware. Light pools on the Sound,
clouds edged in a mystic fire like the flame
in a sunstone. We must not forget our shades:
it’s blinding out. Let’s get blind—leaving well
enough alone is not what we do well:
uncork the spirits. Nothing’s brought to light,
but this is what we have instead of shades
who bring field notes from Asphodel on leaves
torn from a chestnut bursting into flame
in a cemetery where the only sound
is a spiky hail of conkers. Let them sound
off as they will, hallow the ground with well-
worn sermons on detachment. Here, old flame,
watch this limb, on which gregarious sparrows light
en masse, so thick they almost look like leaves—
they leave as if blown by gusts, till nothing shades
this place or hides us from each other. Shades
will always follow us: however sound
our plans, our places, you’re what never leaves
me, and vice versa. Phototropins well
and wane in concert with the slanting light,
bartering greenness for a heart of flame
year after year. Rake up the leaves. Then light
the pile, and sound what depths you can from flame
rising. I’m doing shades of that as well.
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Amy Glynn is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry (2010, 2012, 2024). Her first book, A Modern Herbal, was published by Measure Press in 2013. Her second, Romance Language, won the 2022 Able Muse Book Award. Amy has received the SPUR Award of the Academy of Western Writers, The Troubadour Prize, Poetry Northwest's Carolyn Kizer Award and the Literal Latte Essay Award among other honors, and has received two James Merrill House fellowships. She served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for the cities of Lafayette and Orinda, and lives and works in the East Bay.
Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com